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Authors: Alyson Richman

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BOOK: The Lost Wife
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We all wept when they exchanged their vows. Petr was as young as Lucie, no more than twenty-five, and I felt giddy for both of them. There was a beauty in how physically opposite they were. He was so much taller than she, with broad, flat features and a head full of blond hair. I noticed how large his hands were when they reached out to lift Lucie’s veil, and how tiny her face was when he lifted her chin. His kiss was light and thoughtful, so quiet and gentle. I saw Mother take Papa’s hand in hers and smile at him as if remembering their wedding day.
They left the church for the reception at her parents’ home. It was a rustic farmhouse with exposed beams and a red tile roof. There were crooked apple trees and fragrant pear trees already in bloom in the garden. A white tent had been erected, the poles wrapped with thick yellow ribbon. On a small, makeshift stand, four men sat playing the polka.
It was the first time I had been to Lucie’s childhood home. She had been with my family for years, yet I knew little of her life outside of the one she shared with us. We were united as tightly as a family, but it was always within our apartment or the city of Prague as the backdrop. Now, for the first time, we were seeing Lucie in her surroundings, with her family and her friends. From the corner of the garden, I gazed at the faces of her sisters and saw how they resembled each other. The small features, the narrow chin, and the high, straight bones in their cheeks and jaw. Lucie and her father were the only ones with black hair, as the rest of the family was fair and blond. They were a loud, noisy bunch compared to us. There were large pitchers of Moravian beer and
slivovice
—a homemade plum spirit. There were platters of rustic farm food like sauerkraut and sausages, and the traditional dumpling stew.
Marta and I were clapping and laughing with everyone as a circle formed around Lucie and Petr. We could hear the cheers for the ceremonial plate to be smashed. It was a Czech tradition, not so different from the Jewish one of the groom’s breaking a glass. Unlike the Jewish ritual, though, which symbolized our people’s years of sadness, the Czech one was meant to show the unity of the newly wedded couple. After the plate was broken, Petr was given a broom and Lucie a dustpan, and together they cleaned it up to show their future together.
 
Lucie only stayed with us a year after she got married. She became pregnant in March, and the daily trip to Prague became too exhausting for her. By this time, Marta was nine years old and I was sending out applications to art school. But we missed her greatly. She would still come to visit at least once a month, her belly popping through the blue velvet cape from Mother that she still dutifully wore. She was round like a little dumpling, her cheeks rosy and her hair glossier than ever.
“If I have a girl, I will call her Eliška, after you,” she told my mother. The two of them were now united in that secret sisterhood of mothers, with Marta and me looking on from the outside.
As Lucie’s body changed from her pregnancy, mine finally began changing as well. I had been holding my breath for some time waiting for my body to catch up with the other girls in school—all who seemed to develop before me. That autumn I spent increasingly more time in front of the mirror. I stared at my reflection; the image of the little girl was receding, while a woman’s face and body were coming to the surface. My face, once cushioned with baby fat, was now thinner and more angular, while my body was softer and more curvaceous. In what seemed like a final coup d’état over my body, my breasts seemed to grow several inches overnight and I soon discovered I could no longer close the buttons on some of my blouses.
Part of me wanted to give in to all these changes, overhauling my appearance completely. I came home one day with a fashion magazine and pointed to a photograph of Greta Garbo. “Please, Mama,” I begged. “Let me bob my hair!” I was rushing to be grown up, my head filled with the idea that I could transform into an American movie star overnight. Mother placed down her teacup and took the magazine from me. She smiled. “Keep your braids a little longer, Lenka,” she said, her voice tinged with wistfulness. “It’s taken you years to get your hair this long.”
And so my braids stayed. My mother, however, came to welcome some of the modern trends coming into Prague. She loved the new style of wide-legged trousers, a full blouse peeking out from a high, nipped waist. She bought these fashions for both herself and me, and even had Gizela, her seamstress, make several pairs of pants for us from a pattern book she ordered from Paris.
Unfortunately, my closetful of new, modern clothes failed to alter my perception of myself. I still felt as though I was trapped in a state of awkwardness. I wanted to be more confident and more feminine, but instead I only felt unattractive and insecure. My body seemed completely foreign to me now. For years, I had stared at a girl with braids and a body that seemed like it was cut from a paperdoll book. Now, with the changes of adolescence, I was more self-conscious about how I moved—even how I used my hands to express myself. An arm might now graze my breast when it earlier could move freely in front of me. Even my hips seemed to get in the way when I thought I could squeeze between two chairs.
I tried to focus my attention on my portfolio for art school. This was something that was tangible and something in which I had confidence. In my last year at high school, I had progressed from simple watercolors and pastels to a love of oil paint. When I was not doing homework, I spent my time painting or drawing. Our living room was full of the framed portraits I had done over the years. The small sketches I had done of an infant Marta were now replaced with a large portrait I painted of her in the white dress and pale blue sash she had worn to Lucie’s wedding.
I hoped my portraits could express more than just the appearance of my subject, but their thoughts as well. The hands, the eyes, and the position of the body were like the instruments of a clock, and I only needed to orchestrate them in such a way so as to portray my subject’s inner life. I imagined myself as El Greco, arranging my father in the large recess of his intricately carved chair, the red velvet seat a striking contrast to his black suit. I painted his hands, with the blue ribbons of his veins, the carefully manicured nails, and his laced fingers gently resting on his lap. I painted the blue green of his eyes, reflecting the light. The blackness of his mustache, resting above two closed, pensive lips. My mother, too, offered to sit for me.
Mother’s name, Eliška, when abbreviated to Liska, meant “fox,” and was a nickname my father called her lovingly. I thought of that as I painted her. I asked her to pose in a simple housedress, made of white starched cotton with an eyelet neck and trim on the sleeves. It was the way I loved her most, without her typically powdered face or her elegant wardrobe. My mother, simple and natural. Her pale skin, once revealed, was slightly freckled, like speckles of oatmeal floating in a bowl of milk.
She was always quiet after she studied one of my completed paintings. As if she wanted to say something, but instead held back.
She never spoke of her own time in art school, and certainly there was an air of mystery surrounding her former life as a student. She never displayed the paintings she had done before her marriage. I knew where they were because I had stumbled upon them around the time that Mother first announced she was pregnant with Marta. Lucie and I had gone to the storage cage in the bottom of our apartment building to look for a pump for my bicycle. Each apartment had a small locker, and Mother had given us the key for ours. I had never been down to the basement, and it was like a dark cave filled with everyone’s misbegotten things. We passed old furniture draped in heavy white cloth, leather trunks, and boxes stacked to the ceiling.
Lucie took the key and opened our locker. Papa’s bike was there, along with labeled boxes of china and even more boxes of glasses. We found the pump. It sat next to at least a dozen canvases that rested against the wall, covered by a white sheet.
I remember Lucie moving them cautiously. “I think these are your mother’s,” she said, whispering even though we were the only ones in the basement. Her fingers worked gently to separate each painting so we could both see the images.
Mother’s paintings shocked me. They were not elegant, meticulous reproductions of great masters, or sweet, bucolic landscapes of the Czech countryside. They were sensual and dark, with palettes of plum and deep amber. There was one of a woman reclining on a divan, her pale arm resting behind her head and a naked torso with two rosy nipples and a blanket draped carefully across two crossed legs.
I later wondered about these paintings. The bohemian woman who painted them before she became a wife and mother was not my mother who was running her household upstairs. I tried to revise my image of her, imagining her as a young art student and in the arms of Father when they first met, and wondered if that part of her had disappeared completely, or whether it occasionally resurfaced when Marta and I were fast asleep.
Lucie never mentioned these paintings again. But years later—when I desperately tried to create a full and accurate picture of my mother—I would return to them. For the contrast of the woman and her paintings was impossible to erase from my mind.
 
I was accepted to Prague’s Academy of Art in 1936, when I was seventeen years old. I walked to school every morning with my sketchpad underneath my arm and a wooden box filled with oil paints and sable-haired brushes. There were fifteen students in my class, and although there were five girls in total, I quickly became friends with two girls, Věruška and Elsa. Both girls were Jewish and we shared many of the same friends from our grade school years. A few weeks into our first semester, Věruška invited me to her house for Shabbat. I knew little about her family except that her father and grandfather were both doctors, and her older brother Josef was now at university.
Josef. I still can see him so clearly. He arrived home that night wet, his curly black hair slick from the rain, and his large green eyes the color of weathered copper. I was standing in the hallway when he first arrived, the maid just slipping my coat from my shoulders. He had come through the front door just as I was heading toward the living room.
“Josef,” he said, smiling, as he put down his book bag and handed his coat to the maid. He then extended his hand to me and I took it, his broad fingers wrapping around mine.
I managed to utter my name and smile at him. But I was battling my constant shyness, and his confidence and good looks had rendered me mute.
“Lenka, there you are!” Věruška chimed as she bolted into the hallway. She had changed from the clothes I had seen her wearing in class that afternoon into a beautiful burgundy dress. She threw her arms over me and kissed me.
“I see you’ve met my brother.” She went over and pinched Josef’s cheek.
I was blushing.
“Věruška.” He laughed and swatted her away. “Go tell Mother and Father I’ll be there in a moment.”
Věruška nodded, and I followed her down the hallway to a large living room where her parents were deep in discussion.
The Kohns’ apartment was not unlike ours, with its antique red velvet walls, the dark brown wooden rafters, and large glass French doors. But there was a somber quality to the household that unsettled me.
My eyes scanned the parlor. Around the perimeter of the room there was evidence of the family’s scholarly life. Large medical journals in heavy bindings were stocked on the shelves along with other collections of leather-bound books. Framed diplomas from Charles University and a certificate of commendation from the Czech Medical Association hung on the walls. An imposing, large grandfather clock chimed to sound the hour, and a baby grand piano sat in the corner of the room. On the sofa, Věruška’s mother sat with a piece of needlepoint on her lap. Short and round, Mrs. Kohn wore simple dresses that hid her soft, plump physique. A small pair of reading glasses dangled over her large breasts, and her hair was wrapped plainly and practically in a bun at the nape of her neck.
BOOK: The Lost Wife
10.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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